Project Capuchin of Sony Ericsson bridges J2ME and Flash

Sony Ericsson has created a bridge to enable J2ME and Flash lite to collaborate on your mobile phone. The bridge enables developers to use Flash lite as frontends and J2ME as backends on mobile applications.

With the JavaME / Flash lite bridge it is possible for Java to run a Flash Lite files (*.swf) that is shown on the display. All system events (e.g. key events) are forwarded from Java to Flash Lite and the Flash Lite player has a choice of listening to these events.

In case Flash Lite wants to access some information then it is done through Java. Communication between Flash Lite and JSRs are handled through an intermediate class that works as a translator. This class listens to Flash Lite requests, transfers these to JSR calls, and sends response back to Flash Lite. Communication between Flash Lite and Java is bi-directional meaning that Flash Lite can send requests to and receive events from Java. Requests send from Flash Lite are made in an asynchronous manner.

It makes me wonder where this is all going. Isn’t JavaFX one of the points of all these — creating impeccable mobile applications both on the front and back. Or why not just use SVG on the J2ME applications? NetBeans has some pretty good tools on creating SVG user interfaces for your mobile Java applications. Well I guess several alternatives to creating mobile applications receives a warm welcome to developers.